


Standing at the Edge of the World

by Nell65



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Het, Ice Mechanic, Ice Mechanic Fanfiction June Challenge, PWP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-16 20:52:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7284343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a collection of short fic featuring Ice Mechanic, prompted by the icemechancifanfiction monthly challenges. At the moment they are all set in the same story 'verse. If that changes, I'll let you know. Chapters 1 and 2 are entry for the June <a href="http://icemechanicfanfiction.tumblr.com">IceMechanicfanfiction</a> challenge - theme 'beach.' The porn parts were just me, taking the idea and running with it. Chapter 3 is July, 'anger.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Burdocks and Herring Gulls

**Author's Note:**

> As always, Jeanie205 is a fantastic beta and her encouragement keeps me writing. Hawthorne Whisperer created the community and cheerleads the 'ship. Between the two of them, I discovered I wanted to write lots and lots of 'Roan makes Raven happy' stories.

“Ouch!” Raven yelped and swore despite herself. “Fuck.”

“Sorry,” the man behind her said. “I’m trying to be gentle.”

“I know.” Raven gritted her teeth against another sharp tug on her hair. King Roan of Azgeda had surprisingly clever hands, despite their size, but he was pulling on her sensitive scalp and it hurt. 

She’d worried, just a little, that he’d be clumsy or rough, when he’d told her to sit still and he’d work the burrs out of her braids. He wasn’t. His touch was light, and his fingers more capable of fine motor control than she’d assumed. It was just that the burrs and twigs had decided to knot themselves all the hell up, make themselves at home and stay until autumn, apparently.

“You are being gentle,” she assured him. “I’m just not used to anyone touching my hair.”

“How did you manage to fall right into a patch of cockleburs and burdocks?” he asked.

“You realize I have no idea which plants are which, right?” Raven snorted, and then winced again. Biting her tongue to keep from distracting him. 

There was another sharp tug, and another muttered, ‘sorry.’ 

Then, “I forget,” he said. “You know so many things I don’t. It seems absurd there should be things I know more about than you. In any case,” he added, “I think it was the whole rolling and sliding down the small hill that was the problem.” 

Which is exactly what she’d done. Nicely matting burrs and twigs deep into the braids on the back of her head and throughout her ponytail.

They’d just finished inspecting the first of a pair of old nuclear power plants on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. This one had been falling down, but a still visible ruin, exactly as Roan had promised it would be. 

The roof had caved in long ago and there were small shrubs growing in the old main control room, but she could still see the old racks for the monitors and the shapes of the floors, and trace the power conduits throughout the main structure. The waste containment barrels still appeared to be sealed and buried. 

The radiation levels here were the same as everywhere else, at least, according to her monitor. And with much of the core buildings still half-standing, she’d even been able to get inside and get a good look around the old hot chamber itself.

This power plant, like all those along the shores of the great freshwater lakes, had been decommissioned long before the cataclysm. She and Roan were checking on them anyway. It seemed too easy, but maybe the lower half of the Michigan peninsula, right on the western edge of Azgeda territory, could be one of the mysterious ‘safe’ zones. Monty and another team were headed deep into the Shenandoah Valley on the same quest. Kyle Wick had gone with a third scouting party down toward western Georgia.

In the bright late afternoon, standing on the headland by the collapsed cooling tower, the view out over the big lake had been breathtakingly gorgeous. The light was glinting off the deep blue-green water. So much water it met the horizon and continued on far beyond, if the old maps and Roan’s testimony were to be believed. Faint white curls winked in and out on the lake’s dark surface where a gentle wind was ruffling the peaks of the small waves. The sky was a clear pale blue. Distant puffs of fluffy white clouds were creeping over the horizon off to the north. The dunes below them, bright green in their thick coat of waving beach grass, rolled down toward a wide expanse of smooth pale yellow sand at the water’s edge. 

The early summer sun was hot on the bare skin of her arms and shoulders.

“I don’t suppose we have time to go down there,” she’d said wistfully. Certain he’d say no. 

Roan had volunteered to be her guide on this trip, saying he knew the land and the routes better than anyone else, and until they had a firm direction for any exodus, there was nothing more he could or should be doing in the Azgeda capitol that wasn’t already being done. So it was just the two them, traveling light on a pair of the pretty, sure-footed ponies favored by the Azgeda. 

Raven had balked at first, remembering how hard it had been the one time she’d ridden horseback before. Her leg cramping around the huge barrel of a beast whose back was taller than her head, her hip so frozen she’d had to fall off the saddle and into Abby’s waiting arms. But then Roan had shown her the horses he had in mind. They were much smaller, much more comfortable, and one of them was already trained to go down on one front knee to allow a crippled rider to slide on.

“You can train them to do this?” she’d said, stunned by the horse’s action when the king had demonstrated the command.

“Obviously,” the king had said, one brow raised at the stupidity of her question.

“I’ll need help,” she warned him. “I’ll get stiff riding all day.”

“I know. But you’re the one who said you wished you could see the inside of old plants, to give you some better sense of how to shut down any of them that might still be doing…whatever it was the computer said they were doing.”

So they’d started off. They’d traveled to western Pennsylvania, then north to skirt around the southern edge of Lake Erie, then across the Michigan peninsula to these rolling dunes on the southern shore of yet another huge freshwater lake. Visiting one decommissioned, gently decomposing, and still quite dead hulk at a time, each new one helpfully located about a day’s hard ride distant from the last.

The first three had burned and collapsed at some point in the last century and so there was little left of the core rooms or the mechanical parts for Raven to examine. The fourth looked a lot like it must have been bombed, perhaps even during the cataclysm itself, but, in any case, there was nothing left there either. All four waste containment systems were still functioning. Or, if they weren’t, whatever they were leaking did nothing to alter the new, post-cataclysm levels of background radiation, which were the same there as everywhere else.

Today’s power plant, with its half-walls leaning drunkenly every which way, had – by comparison – survived quite well. They’d arrived late the evening before and she’d spent most of today clambering all over what remained of the guts of the place. There had even still been rusted-out machinery for her to examine.

Roan had stayed with her, having learned by now that it was easier for them both if he was beside her when she inevitably stumbled or got stuck, or needed a hand up or down. 

He was also pretty useful as an assistant, she’d discovered. He had good eyes, and a lifetime of wilderness experience. He spotted the shapes of the buildings, the doorways, the foundations, the bumps and the holes that marked old construction, the failed subfloors, and the potentially dangerous plummets to underground levels, long before she did, though he was teaching her to read the landscape better. 

Today, when they’d actually had more building to explore, he’d ended up taking notes for her. After she’d accidently offended him by asking him if he could write. In her defense, she’d seen him consulting and updating his sketchbook/cum travel journal/cum atlas several times during their journey and she’d never seen any words in it.

But he could write. Painstakingly slowly, like a man who didn’t write often, but he could, and in a bold clear hand. And his numbers were fine. So she paced, and measured, and pointed out things, and he sketched and wrote what she told him.

By late afternoon she’d been hot and tired and sweaty, and at the same time covered in drying mud and slime from the various dark and dank corners she’d been poking around in. When she’d looked down at the beach, the warm yellow sand and the sparkling clean water had presented an irresistible temptation.

To her surprise, he’d agreed. He’d said this was a good place to camp, and tomorrow’s trip would be relatively short.

So they’d started down the dunes. He’d suggested they ride because the sand would be hard to walk on, but she was so damn tired of sitting in the saddle. She’d wanted to continue on her own feet. Especially because she’d been pretty sure what he’d meant was that the dunes would be hard _for her_ to walk on and fuck that, she was getting stronger and more agile every day.

He’d shrugged, taken both sets of reins himself and gestured for her to precede him and the ponies.

Half-way to the beach, she’d lost her footing, twisted and fallen and slid down an unexpected, and surprisingly steep, gully between two curving dunes. She’d relaxed and rolled once she realized she was going down, so other than what would no doubt be another excellent set of bruises, she hadn’t hurt herself.

But she’d crashed right through a thicket of something or another that was definitely NOT beach grass. She had burrs and sticky seedpods everywhere. On her jeans. On her tank top. On her boots and worming into her socks. A determined few had even worked their way into her bra. And dozens and dozens had embedded in her hair, especially in her ponytail and the back of her head.

After he’d helped her get back on her feet, saying not a word but conveying volumes of silent “I told you so’s” anyway, they’d finally made it to the beach.

Which was just as fantastic up close as it had looked at a distance. The breeze was dropping, and the water was calming, making the most restful sloshing sound as it slapped lazily against the sandy shore. She could hear birds in the distance, and saw an eagle spiraling just above the forest edge that rose behind the dunes marching along the curving shore. The sand, as soon as she’d stripped off her boots and socks, was so warm it was almost hot between her toes. It also made the most amazing ‘screech, screech’ sound as she dragged her feet through it, which made her laugh. 

“I didn’t know sand talked!” she cried to Roan, who was busy unsaddling and hobbling their ponies for the night. 

The sand was firmer and cooler by the edge of the water, and the water itself, breaking over her toes, made her whole body feel better. So she plopped down and pulled off her brace, tossed it up to the dry sand behind her, rolled up the bottoms of her trousers and scooted forward until her feet were submerged past her ankles in the tiny breaking wavelets. 

“Your ass is going to get wet,” Roan said, coming up behind her.

“I know. I don’t care.” She was leaning forward, scooping up handfuls of water and splashing them on her face and shoulders, down her arms, around her neck, contemplating dripping handfuls down the front of her shirts, between her tits.

“Can you swim?” He asked her.

“No!”

“I can. I’m going in.”

“Okay,” she replied, peering up at him as she shaded her eyes with her hand. “Enjoy yourself.”

He stared down at her, looking oddly awkward and uncomfortable. “I don’t want to get my clothes wet,” he said.

Raven frowned up at him, wondering what he was getting at. “That makes sense,” she said.

And then he _really_ made sense.

He’d been extremely cautious and respectful of her privacy and personal space. And she of his. Each of them making sure to take sufficient distance for private business. Both of them changing quickly behind their horses, and only when it was necessary. Despite the muggy heat further inland, she’d seen him with his undershirt off only a few times, and only as he was changing. The glimpses of his chest and abs she’d caught had been impressive, as were his arms, exposed by the sleeveless shirts he wore under the layers of clothing the grounders seemed to prefer. But he stayed resolutely clothed despite the summer temperatures.

She knew he looked at her with interest and approval, especially once she’d stripped down to her own layered tanks. She’d caught him watching her a few times, when he was just too slow to look away. She was also politely ignoring how quickly he tended to vanish into the trees in the early mornings.

He’d touched her, of course. Picked her up when she fell, reached out to steady her, boosted her up and helped her down as they crawled over and around ruins. Lifted her off her horse when long days in the saddle had frozen her hip. Tossed her back up easily whenever they mounted up and there was no good place for her horse’s clever knee bending trick. But he’d kept all of that completely, not impersonal exactly, but oddly professional. The way Jackson or Lincoln had helped her in the past.

And through it all, he’d been very careful to never do or say anything the slightest bit suggestive. She was trying to repay the courtesy. For all she knew he had some partner someplace he was committed to. Which is why he was staring down at her now with a faintly pained expression.

“Of course. Right,” she said, and twisted so that her back was to him.

She did straighten out as soon as she heard him splash into the water, feeling obscurely confident, or willing to tell herself that she was, that rear views did not violate their unspoken rules.

The first thing she noticed was that he was much tanner than she had realized, now that she could see the strong contrast from his back to his pale, nicely muscled ass, his gluts bunching and stretching as he waded into deeper water, and then again when she ran he eyes on down to his darker legs. Which made her wonder when and where he’d been running around in the sun without his shirt or long trousers. Certainly not in the last week or more.

She only noticed the scars on his back after that. Multiple hard pale ridges coiling across his shoulder blades and snaking down either side of his spine. These, at least, definitely seemed stylistically related to the ones on his face. There were also a lot of other more random scars, most looking far less intentionally decorative. The recent scar on his bicep, for example, where Bellamy had shot him, just before everything went down in Polis.

He dove cleanly into the water and swam easily. Long curved overhead strokes, just like in the old movies she’d seen over the years. The water on his skin glistened in the sun. His head, dark against the sun blaze turning the water a molten green-gold, grew smaller and smaller as he made straight for the horizon.

And she suddenly panicked, remembering the giant water snake that had apparently nearly eaten Octavia on the delinquents’ first day on the ground. Not that Raven had ever seen one. Just heard the stories. She reminded herself, over her thudding heart, that this was Roan’s world and he clearly knew how to swim, and swim well, and she should assume he knew what he was doing. Another minute or two later, to a wash of relief that was almost painful, she realized he must have turned around and was swimming back towards shore.

She went back to washing off her face and scratched up arms, as much of her skin as she could reach, really, without stripping and crawling into the water herself. 

When he stood up, still waist deep, she called out, “You look good, swimming. Makes me jealous.”

“If we make it through the summer, maybe you’ll have time to learn.”

Which was clearly not an offer to teach her himself, right now. She turned away and rolled to her hands and knees, then pulled her good leg forward and got it under her. It wasn’t graceful or attractive, but it was the only way she could get to her feet.

They puttered around each other, familiar now with the rhythms of setting up camp and putting together an evening meal. Tonight they were eating cold food out of their saddlebags. He’d done no hunting today, been too busy helping her once she drafted him as her research assistant.

After their small supper, she decided to grapple with the sticks and burrs still in her hair from her tumble through the dunes. Which rapidly turned into a snarled mess as she tried to work the burrs out of the braids at the back of her head by touch alone.

“Stop doing that!” Roan said. “You’re making it worse. Let me.”

He’d pulled her comb from her bag, and then dropped down behind her, his long legs framing hers in. His bare toes dug into the sand in front of her as she watched the herring gulls swoop down over the nearly still surface of the water, rising up with small fish in their long curved beaks.

The sun was hanging low in the sky, and the daytime heat was fading. The sand underfoot was losing its yellow glow, and turning into a myriad of tiny specks of faded colors, mostly pale greys and tans, browns and a few blacks and reds. It still made the same ‘screech, screech’ sounds, though, as she dug her hands through it, letting it spill between her fingers, over and over again. 

Roan worked with the comb and his fingers to pull out scores of tiny burrs. He laid a half-dozen shapes and colors down in the sand between their knees, naming the plants they came from as he did. Most of them came free easily, but a few had rolled themselves into tiny little nests and ultimately had to be yanked out. Along with a few strands straight from her scalp. Those were the ones that made her swear, screwing up her eyes against the automatic tears.

“You’re really pretty good at this,” she said, once he had her hair burr- and twig-free, and was just working the comb through it in easy, restful strokes. “You’ve done this before?”

“I used to comb my wife’s hair.”

There was something very final sounding in the ‘used to.’ But his voice was calm and open.

“What happened to her?”

“She died in childbirth.”

That was somehow not at all what she’d been expecting. Not that she’d been aware of expecting anything. But whatever it had been, this wasn’t it. “Your child?”

“Died with his mother.” 

“I’m so sorry.”

“It happens. Far more often than it should. Anyway, it was a long time ago now. More than ten years.”

Raven did some rapid mental math, and came up with a number disconcertingly close to her own age. “She must have been very young.”

“Yes. We both were.”

“You never remarried? Found anyone else?”

“No. Life went a different way.”

He was still combing her hair. The burrs and twigs were long gone.

Testing something she didn’t have any words for yet, Raven tilted her chin and shifted her weight backwards towards him and said, “That feels really nice.”

“Well, it’s all done,” he said. He stopped combing her hair. 

Raven could feel him gather himself to shift away from behind her, so she dropped her hand onto his thigh. “Roan?”

She felt him freeze. 

“Yes?” he said.

She leaned to the side and twisted so she could see his face. “I can’t get pregnant.”

He blinked. “What?”

“I have a birth control implant. They are 99.9% effective. Mine in particular has been working fine for years.” She smirked suggestively as she added, “Thoroughly tested under real-world conditions.”

He was just staring at her now, without any expression at all. The long curved scars that ran from his temples to his jaws standing out pale against the dark summer tan of his face. His own hair had dried in the evening sun, wavier than usual, and with sun-bleached strands loosed from the high tieback he favored falling down along the sides of his face. He’d shaved off his beard at some point in the spring, but his cheeks were rough with two- or three-day old stubble.

Raven went on, “This would be a terrible time to take the implant out, what with the world maybe ending soon, and it requires minor surgery anyway. Not that Abby would ever take mine out now at all, probably, given my hip and my back. Not without a huge fight about it.”

She actually saw his throat work as he swallowed. 

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“When was the last time you fucked a woman without being afraid you’d get her pregnant?”

His answer, when it came, was almost on an exhale of breath he’d been holding, “Been a long time.”

“You could fuck me every hour, on the hour, for a month straight. Other than major chafing, nothing else would happen. I would not get pregnant.”

“Well,” he frowned and then smiled faintly at her, “Pleasure happens. I would hope.”

“I may have sneaked a peak as you were coming out of the water,” she confessed. This was absolutely true. Even coming out of the cold lake his bits were impressive. Though after so many days of travelling together, that was hardly her only data about what it might be like to fuck him. “I’m assuming pleasure as a theoretical given.” 

He raised his brows, his pale eyes wide in the evening light, and shining with something a lot like smug amusement. “You are?”

“Yes. I am.” She shifted around more fully and reached up to touch his face, gently pulling his chin so that he was looking directly at her. “Would you like to fuck me?”

He still didn’t move. 

She had no idea what he was thinking about, what concerns or odds he was calculating. But, sometime in the last few minutes, sitting between his legs, aware of the heat radiating off him as the air around them continued to cool, she’d decided that she really, really wanted to fuck him.

So she slid her hand around his jaw and tugged him just another hair closer as she raised her lips to his. 

“Raven.” His voice was rough and low and he was nearly whispering as he finally answered her. “Please don’t regret this.”

“I won’t,” she promised. And then she kissed him.


	2. Burdocks and Herring Gulls, part 2

She kissed him. Gently. Just a quick press of her lips to his. Waiting to see how he’d respond.

He didn’t move. Not towards her, but also not away. 

It occurred to her that his immobility might be a result of him still being completely unsure that this was actually happening, if she was really offering. So she kissed him again. And again. 

The third time he shifted, just a little. Tilted his head to the side to lean into her hand, his eyelids drooping. He let his lips soften, just enough. This was all the encouragement she needed to kiss him again, and to press harder this time, linger longer, let her lips drag against his.

He began responding more actively after that, kissing her now rather than simply being kissed. Raising his own hands to tangle in her hair, his kisses changed. Growing more demanding, more aggressive, he nudged her mouth open wider, inviting her to press deeper.

Her tits and her cunt started to ache, the kind of aching that wanted nothing more than a firm squeeze from a big strong hand.

She attempted to melt further into him despite the awkward angle, but then her stupid hip twinged hard and she had to spin forward with a quick jerk and a muffled yelp to pull out of the cramp. 

He let go of her immediately. “You okay?”

“Stupid hip,” she muttered, flashing him a short apologetic smile over her shoulder before shaking out her leg and trying to reposition it. 

The wind had dropped almost to nothing, the wavelets breaking on the shore were a barely audible trickle, and the beach grass made no sound at all. Into the stillness he said, “Bedrolls.”

Shifting out from around her, he rose and crossed over to their pile of gear, the grating, sing-song hiss as he strode barefoot through the sand seeming very loud in the evening hush to Raven’s sensitive ears. 

While he shook out their furs and blankets, layering them on top of each other instead of the usual meter and a half apart, Raven crawled to her feet. The sand underfoot was almost cold now against her bare toes, and she spared a quick thought for how quickly it reacted to the absence of the sun.

Once she’d joined him, stepping off the cool sand and onto the blankets with some relief, he dropped to his knees and went to work on the buckles and straps of her brace. She balanced herself with her fingers on his shoulder. 

Though there was nothing particularly erotic in his touch, anticipation flooded through her all the same. Just knowing that this was all in preparation was enough, and the ache growing in her tits and between her legs began to throb, just a little. And wetness, just a little, began to pool inside her cunt.

After he laid her brace aside, he sat back on his heels and looked up at her, his expression still shaded by the slightest hint of wariness. 

Feeling a funny mix of amusement, appreciation and exasperation for his hesitation, she reached for the hems of her tank tops and pulled them off over her head, shaking her hair free across her shoulders as she tossed them aside. Then, with her gaze fixed on his face, she reached back and unhooked her bra, pulling it off and letting it drop from her fingers. She felt the last warmth of the evening sun on her skin and she raised her face and let her eyes close, taking a moment to savor it. And possibly also too, pulling her shoulders back and showing off her rack to the best advantage.

Then she swung her head again to let her hair fall, long and silky, over her shoulder as she looked back down at him. She already knew he liked her hair, so she figured she’d make the most of it.

Uncovering her tits had worked wonders on the boys in her past, and seemed to have the same galvanizing effect on the man at her feet now. He ran his hands up the back of her legs, her ankles to her calves, up her thighs, cupping her ass and squeezing gently. She smiled in satisfaction and let her fingers come to rest on his shoulders, enjoying his touch and not wanting to stagger.

His eyes still on hers, he slid his hands up her sides to her waist, his palms warm against her bare skin. Then he skimmed his fingers around and reached for the fastenings on her trousers, pulling them open then pushing them down over her hips and helping her to kick her feet free. Tossing her trousers after her shirts, he offered her his hands to steady herself as she sat down.

Bending awkwardly at the waist, she ended up half-falling to the ground with an ungainly thud, rocking back onto one hand and nearly catching him in the side with her heel. Sitting upright pushed some of the moisture pooling inside her cunt out with a little rush, and she was very conscious of the fresh wetness on the blankets beneath her. 

Rising swiftly to his feet, he stepped out his own trousers, tossing them after hers and then pulling off his shirt. 

Watching him strip, Raven’s heart beat a little faster. He looked astonishingly like that famous Renaissance sculpture of an idealized human male she’d studied years and years ago in her art and history courses up on the Ark. Roan, like the statue, was all broad shoulders tapering to a narrower waist, and the heavy muscles of his arms and chest and abs and thighs were every bit as sharply defined. He also reminded her a little of Lincoln, or Bellamy, though possibly even better, and for one terribly guilty heartbeat, she felt incredibly smug.

She could also see Roan’s dick, thick and long and hard and practically straining for her as he stood at the edge of their blankets. So she leaned back, resting her weight on her hands and spread her knees wide, silently urging him to get to on with the fucking. Right now. She wanted him so badly she was nearly whimpering, and her heart was thudding so hard she could hear it inside her own ears.

He dropped back down to his knees, landing just between her feet, reaching out to wrap his fingers around her ankle. He dragged his fingertips up her leg to her knee, where he squeezed gently, making her flinch and moan, just a little.

He smirked at her, and then skimmed his fingers down her inner thigh as he swayed still closer to her. She shivered and bit her lip, trying hard to swallow the moan creeping up her throat. 

The movement of his fingers slowed, pausing along her inner thigh, just centimeters now from where she needed them most, and he met her eyes again, seeming to want some last sign from her. 

She dropped back to her elbows, planted her feet more firmly and tilted her pelvis towards him and said, “Fuck me. Now.”

He actually lifted his hand away and looked at her, his brows raised. “Are you certain?”

“Oh my fucking god. Put your dick inside me!” Suddenly worried she might have sounded just a smidgen too demanding, she tried a smile and added a strangled, “Please!”

His wide quicksilver grin, which she’d rarely seen, lit his face and he transformed in an instant from vaguely forbidding man to a completely endearing one, and then he leaned forward, catching his weight on his hands to crawl forward, dragging his cock against her as he moved over her. 

She curled up enough to reach down and spread her herself open with her own fingers, feeling just how wet and ready she was, and guiding the head of his dick inside her with her other hand. Then she fell back, running her hands admiringly from his hips, across his smooth, firm belly and up across his abs and his chest to his shoulders and let him take it from there.

Which he did, entering her with one, long slow push that stretched her and filled her and made her tremble and sigh in relief and pleasure all mixed up together.

She pulled her bad leg into a better position, hiking it higher and taking some of the strain off her hip. He immediately shifted in response, finding a better angle for them both. Then he started to move, sliding out and back, rolling his hips into hers with a quick twist at the end of each thrust, making her hum in pleasure at each new stroke.

Wrapping her arms and her good leg around him, she explored every part of him that she could touch with her hands and the soles of her feet. The skin on his back was warm and smooth, interrupted by the hard ridges of the scars he bore, the oldest swooping and curling in smooth lines as she traced them with her fingertips, the latest gunshot wound on his shoulder, not very far from his heart, still a knotted mass of freshly healing skin. 

The muscles in his arms and legs and ass were rigid with effort, flexing and pushing with each new thrust into her. He dropped his shoulders closer to the ground, close enough for him to kiss her, and she tilted her head and opened her mouth for him.

She was squeezing internally as tightly as she could, damning her laziness with the kegel exercises Abby was always pushing on her, along with all the other physical therapy stretches and isometrics she ignored, and swore again to do better in the future. When she heard him sigh, she squeezed him again as hard as she could, smirking triumphantly against his mouth. And then she did it again.

He dropped his face into the side of her neck, his heavy breathing loud in her ear, and the soft stubble of his cheeks tickling her skin. She slipped her hands up to tangle in his thick hair, turning her head to murmur encouragement, telling him how good he felt, how much she liked it, that he could hit her harder and deeper, or fast and shallow, she wanted it all, everything he had. 

He lifted his shoulders back away from her and did a little of both. Things started to blur for her after that, her whole world shrinking down to the handful of pressure points where his body met hers. She was beyond speech now, but noise she could make and she did, gasping and humming and letting out faint cries whenever he hit her particularly deep and particularly well.

Time stretched, narrowing to the feel of his big cock slipping in and out of her, on the hot currents of pleasure radiating out across her hips, down into her thighs and up through her belly. She moved her foot off his leg to press into the ground, lifting and sliding in counterpoint against him, clinging to his arms for balance. And the heat in her belly and her cunt grew.

Sweat was beading across his shoulders, and the small of his back. She could feel her own sweat pooling between her breasts and along her neck. The skin where their bellies met was slick with it. 

She brought her hands back to his face, exploring the hard jut of his cheekbones and the ridge of his brow, the harsh line of his jaw, the strong arch of his nose, and the shape of his lips. Then she pulled him closer so she could kiss him again. 

Her whole body felt electrified, as though a current were running from her fingers to her toes, forcing her muscles tight with anticipation. 

He was buried deep inside her now, rocking into her with hard little jerks, his whole body rigid with strain, and then he came with a strangled groan. She could feel his dick pulsing hot and heavy inside her, and once more she squeezed as tightly as she could around him, wanting to savor the feeling, wanting to remind him that this wasn’t anything she feared. 

When he relaxed on a heavy sigh, letting his whole weight down to crush her into the blankets, she just wrapped her arms and leg more tightly around him and pressed kisses into his shoulder and then along the side of his face. 

Her own nerves were still revving, she’d been just trembling along the edge of her own peak. She trusted he’d attend to her in turn, she did, but she rolled her hips a few times, pressing up against him anyway, just so he didn’t forget.

He promptly pulled out and repositioned her, urging her to scoot up the blankets and move until he had her ass where he wanted it. Then he slithered down and buried his face between her legs, lifting up her ass with his hands, his tongue lapping and circling her swollen clit, gently at first and then harder and faster as he responded to her breathy commands.

She’d been so close already that in hardly any time at all she was back to rocking and twisting, fisting her hands in the blankets and staring up at the deepening sky, aware of the cool air on her tits and her belly, of the tightpu pucker of her nipples, of the heat pooling low and heavy between her legs, of the slick wet under his mouth. She’d just realized that if she tilted her head back, she could see the first stars in the eastern sky, when, with a liquid rush and a hard jerk, she came, her shoulders lifting entirely off the blankets as her muscles contracted in a spasm of pleasure and release.

Once he’d coaxed out the last of the aftershocks and she’d pulled away, suddenly too tender to bear his touch, he moved up to lie on his side, pressed close to her. Drawn by his heat, she wiggled closer still. 

He took the opportunity to run his hand up and down the length of her torso, pressing gently into her hips and her belly, tracing his fingers along her collar bones, feeling along the lines of her own new scars across her ribs, and pausing for quite a long time to explore her tits. Then he bent his head and sucked her whole areole into his hot mouth, flicking at her nipple with his tongue. Without really willing it, she arched into his touch and moaned softly, and then she realized she could feel his thick cock tapping against her thigh.

She reached down to brush it, testing for fullness, wrapping it with her fingers when she liked what she found, and squeezing gently. “Again?” she asked.

He met her eyes. “If you like?”

She grinned broadly at him then pushed at his shoulder, urging him onto his back while she rolled on top of him. 

“I like,” she said, once she was lying along the length of his body. “You feel so good inside me. I want to fuck you again.”

She couldn’t kneel on top, not like she’d once been able to, but there were upsides to lying down. Body heat, for one. Friction on her clit for another. She could also brace her arms on the ground, her palms digging into the sand below the blankets on either side of his head as she pushed hard against him, taking him in as far as she could, riding him slowly at first, grinding her hips, waiting for her body to catch up with her head, and then she moved faster, pressed down harder. 

With his hands on her waist driving her more firmly onto his cock, and pushing up hard against her, her orgasm built gradually and then burst. It wasn’t as intense or as long as the first, but it was good enough. 

As soon as he felt her relax against him, he rolled them both and finished off quickly with some very satisfying, deeply angled thrusts. 

This time she held him close when he started to move off her, completely unwilling to face the inevitable surge of cool air against her sweaty skin. “No,” she whined softly. “You’re warm. I’ll get cold.”

“I’ll wrap you in a blanket, but I have to check on the horses.”

“Fine,” she pouted. 

So he kissed her. Then he lifted himself away and stood up, shaking out the last blanket and draping it on top of her before he turned for the horses, just as he promised. She rolled over to watch him. The horses hadn’t moved far but he urged them closer into the dunes behind them anyway. 

She noted, with both interest and appreciation, that he no longer seemed very interested in his clothes. And that starlight and the low half moon provided plenty of light to admire him by.

By the time they settled back into their blankets, the night air was cold enough that it was only natural, Raven assured herself, to turn to him for warmth, skin to skin, etc.… She was sure Pike had once mentioned something about it, back in Earth Skills class, earning himself a room full of teenaged cackling.

Raven was still grinning at the memory in the dark, thinking score one for horny teenagers, when Roan kissed her. 

This time he finished her off with his fingers while he was pressed tightly behind her, his teeth scraping gently against the join of her neck and shoulder, and she almost cried it felt so good.

She woke slowly, basking in the warmth of the human furnace sleeping at her back. Usually the damp, predawn chill roused her, but not today. The sun was clearly well up into the eastern sky, already glittering out on the clear water of the lake, sparkling frothy white on the tiny little rills cresting on the wavelets. But the beach where they had slept, protected by the high dunes behind them, was still in blue shadow. 

She was surprised that Roan was still in the blankets with her, but maybe he’d been seduced by the extra body heat as well. She wiggled over to her other side, trying to move without exposing any more flesh to the morning air. 

He must have been more awake than she knew, because he shifted at the same time, rolling over to face her, his own eyes quite alert.

“You’re still here!” she said with a pleased smile, reaching over to rest her hand against his chest, and pressing her thighs together in response to a fresh wave of desire rolling through her. 

He settled his hand onto her hip as he said, “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Very thoughtful of you,” she said, arching her back a bit, so she could push her chest and belly into his.

He slid his hand down over her hip and her thigh, catching her knee and tugging her leg high across his own hip. She rocked her hips even closer in response, shifting just enough to wrap her arm around his waist, holding herself firmly against his warm body, and angling her cunt just a little more. 

She shivered hard when he pressed his dick inside her, pushing through her swollen flesh, already slick and wet and ready for him, and pulsing faintly as her arousal spiraled higher.

“I’m very thoughtful,” he said, once he was fully buried inside her.

She tilted her chin to meet his eyes. “What if I didn’t wake up horny?”

“I bet the other way.”

The sun was much higher in the sky when she fell back onto the blankets with a happy sigh. 

Drawing her hand up through the sweat on her belly, she looked down at the sparkling water, and then over at him and asked, “Can you teach me to swim today?”


	3. Tick Tock

Raven watched as the door closed behind Clarke. 

Closed behind Clarke, and behind the last three members of Raven’s team. 

_“It’s a priority, Raven! You know I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to!”_

Standing alone in her now echoingly empty garage, Raven picked up the tea mug on her worktable and hurled it towards the doorframe. The pottery cup crashed to the ground a meter short and shattered into dozens of not remotely satisfying pieces. Splashes from the dregs of her tea were almost invisible against the stains on the old cement floor.

She whirled around, searching almost frantically for something else to smash, desperate to let out the fury beating in her chest before it consumed her in one giant ball of self-immolating fire.

She found two more empty mugs.

Smash. 

Crash.

An empty pitcher.

Unsatisfyingly large chunks.

Two plates, hurled sideways like Frisbees. 

One. Two.

Beautiful explosions of flying ceramic.

Her stupid team shouldn’t leave all these dirty dishes just lying about. Sloppy, messy, useless fuckers. Who needed them anyway? Clarke got what she deserved.

Raven spied one last small crockery dish, just out of her reach. She stomped over to it, seized it and whirled, letting it soar it as she spun around.

And very nearly took out Roan’s eye with the flying shards.

He jerked back, dodging most of the spray and protecting his face from the rest with his raised arm. 

“What the fuck, Raven?” he snapped.

Weeks and weeks in her company, ever since they’d left for their tour of dead nuclear plants, had led to some interesting cross-pollination in his language. And not of the ennobling sort, the way Lincoln and Octavia had taught each other the best of their respective cultures. Nope. Raven and Roan had taught each other all the curse words they knew, and they both had also acquired much richer vocabularies for talking about sex. 

Neither was particularly useful for diplomacy.

“She took my team! My whole Goddamned team!” Raven waved her arms around, indicating all the empty spaces where there should be people hard at work. “Five days ago I had fifteen people in here, working on the new filtration systems. I started this morning with three. Three! And she just snatched them away too!” 

“I see,” he said, after a long pause while he fought to drag his gaze back up from Raven’s heaving chest. Because he was just that kind of a dick. 

“That sucks,” he said. “But,” and here he took on the long-suffering expression of one lecturing to a somewhat dim child, “you know that they have to work on the retaining wall, all the moving around has weakened it. We can’t survive if the river floods out the mines by accident before the worst of the fallout even arrives.”

“Why are you taking her side?” Raven demanded angrily, finding his patient tone, explaining things she damn well already knew and had already dismissed as wholly unsatisfactory excuses, to be only adding insult to injury.

“Her side? I’m not taking her side! I’m just telling you what you should already know and understand!” 

His patient façade was starting to crack, which just irritated Raven further. She was the wronged party here, dammit. Not Clarke.

“I understand,” Raven snarled, her voice growing louder, “that it won’t matter if the mines are dry as dust, if they’re also full of radiation! She had enough people already, and she could have spared me my pitiful team. But, oh no. Clarke always knows fucking best. Waltzes in and does whatever she fucking well pleases no matter how stupid or counterproductive it is, and we all just agree!” Raven changed her voice to mimic an infantile hero worshiper, “Oh, Clarke, whatever you say, Clarke, whatever can I do to help you fuck over everybody, Clarke?”

“Maybe something changed! You don’t know!”

“Stop defending her!”

“I’m not defending her!”

Raven charged right on. “We won’t survive at all if we can’t filter the air we breathe and the water we drink! I have to have my team!”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“Because you’re yelling at me!” she yelled. He wasn't yelling, and somewhere inside her head she knew that, but he'd definitely raised his voice and that was enough.

A hush fell, the air heavy with silence. Then Roan raised his hands, palms out. “Let’s start over,” he said, in a more normal tone. “When did Clarke take the last of your team?”

Raven, blood roaring, still trembling with adrenaline and her ragged heartbeat pounding in her skull, replied in a quieter, if somewhat shaky voice. “Right before you walked in. That’s why I was still smashing things.” 

She gestured at the mess on the floor, torn between feeling mildly apologetic and spitefully pleased.

“Right before I walked in?” He asked, returning to sounding as though he were prying information from an idiot.

“Yes!” Raven made an annoyed face at him. “Just what I said.”

“She sent a runner to me at least half an hour ago, telling me I needed to come see you. That it was urgent.” He was shaking his head, disbelief, exasperation, admiration all passing through his eyes as he put it together, “She knew…”

“That she was going to piss me off,” Raven interrupted, assembling the pieces as quickly as he did, her irritation levels soaring again. Just because she was sleeping with him didn’t make Roan her fucking minder. “Clever girl, our Clarke.”

He nodded. “Right. But when did calming you down become my job?”

Offended by his vague sense of outrage despite it echoing her own, Raven raised her brows. “You got some better job you could be doing?”

He must have caught her tone, because after shooting her a quick, sharp glance he shook his head at her, a faint smile ghosting across his lips. It was gone by the time he said, “Better? No. Adjudicating disputes over space allocation among competing clans is a thankless job. But it’s also an important one, and I’m about the last person left with enough status to do it without further bloodshed. Walking away in the middle doesn’t help.”

That sounded like a typically and thanklessly kingly task, Raven thought. Kinging, she’d come to realize, was largely an overwhelming burden, an endless exercise in mediating quarrels while trying to keep everyone fed and dry and clothed and working for their own survival. She’d stopped wondering that Roan came up with as many excuses as he did to get out of it. But the excuses were failing more often than not these days. 

Looking at him now, worry lines worn deep in the grooves between his eyes and around his mouth, turning his handsome face harsh and making him appear every one of his thirty-five years and more, Raven had a new thought. 

She wondered if, maybe, Clarke was trying to offer them something in return, something to make up for the theft of Raven’s team.

Raven lifted her chin, opening her eyes wide as she raised her gaze to his, hoping she looked beguiling and winsome rather than hot and cranky. “Clarke obviously thinks space allocation is less important than soothing me.”

“And Clarke is working hard at making me regret not drowning her when I had the chance.” 

His quick snarl and icy glare directed at the door definitely did not sound as though he was on board with the tentative plans Raven was forming. 

Yet, anyway.

“When did you have the chance to drown her?” she asked him, half-distracted by the way her remaining rage was dropping down to flood her cunt, making her shift restlessly.

“I had her head under water,” Roan told her. “She’d stopped fighting. I could have held her there. Instead,” he shrugged, “I let her up, to take her to Lexa.”

“Ah,” Raven said. Everyone knew that story. About another deal Lexa broke. And the various and horrible consequences of that. She looked at Roan’s expression, now furrowed and ugly with a deep scowl. 

She didn’t believe for a second that he’d really wanted to drown Clarke then, or that he wanted to drown her now. Murder was not his preferred solution for political or personal disputes in general. In particular, he liked Clarke, and was one of the few people besides Bellamy or her mother who could slow her roll when she got obsessed with her latest brilliant scheme to save them all, whatever it was. 

But they were all exhausted and afraid right now. Even kings.

Raven limped the last few steps closer to him. “That was the right thing to do. She saved us all from ALIE.”

His expression smoothed and he reached up to brush some loose strands of Raven’s hair back behind her ear, his fingers gentle against her cheek. “You did it together. She couldn't have done it without you.”

The last bubbles of her rage at Clarke popped and dissipated. Raven caught his face in her hands, pulled him in and kissed him. Hard.

“What was that for?” he asked her, his big hands wrapping loosely around her wrists and holding her close. “Sparing her life? Or sometimes regretting it?”

“Both,” Raven smiled against his lips, pressing closer into him as she tilted her head for another kiss. “Neither.”

“Raven,” he dodged her mouth when she came in for a third time. “I have to get back.”

“You’re still working. Remember? Keeping me from trashing my workspace?”

“I….”

She kissed him quiet, running her hands down his sides to slip her fingers under the edge of his shirt. 

“I’m still all hot and bothered,” she murmured. “I need your help to calm down.”

He laughed softly, “That’s what we’re calling it today?”

“Why not?”

He searched her eyes for a long second, and then he asked, “Does that door lock?”

“No, but the one on the inner office does.” Raven grinned triumphantly.

He held up his wrist and pointed to the dial. “Thirty minutes.”

“Who gave you a watch?”

“You did.” His smirk erased the worst of the lines around his mouth. “Tick tock.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have a little more of this canon AU in my head, which is why I initially left the number of chapters open ended, and then the next challenge prompt showed up in the same story. I don't know how much more there will be. Some of it depends on how much I want to try and guess their nuclear destruction plot (not much?) or if I can think of a plausible enough work around.


End file.
